How the Strong Experience Is Triggered

A strong experience involves a sudden experience characterized by a strong feeling. One kind of strong feeling is an epistemic feeling of coming to know something highly significant, though what is known may be ineffable. The other kind of strong feeling is a sudden phasic arousal such as a chill or tears or some other bodily feeling that can otherwise be associated with emotion. The strong experience can involve both of these feelings, but sometimes just one is felt. In this book I have put strong experiences into three groups. One is the ‘thrill’ which is often just the arousal. The second is the ‘sublime’ which is often both the epistemic feeling and the arousal. The third is the ‘epiphany’ which is often just the epistemic feeling. Neither the strong experience in itself nor these three subtypes are natural kinds of experience. Rather, they are a way of grouping certain experiences which might be related, with the goal of understanding why they arise.

I have suggested that strong experiences all start as surprise. This explains why they are sudden and brief, like surprise. It also explains why they can be triggered, like surprise, and by triggers which are surprising. It explains why they involve an epistemic feeling, because surprise is basically an epistemic event of coming to know something not previously known. Why the feeling of significance arises is discussed in Chapter 3, as is the feeling of ineffability. And strong experiences involve arousal because surprise involves arousal, as discussed in Chapter 4. There are various ways in which surprise can arise, but in this book I focus on the way by which ‘if a discrepancy between schema and input occurs, surprise is elicited’ (Meyer et al. 1991: 296). I have proposed two ways in which a discrepancy might generate a strong experience. The first is when the perception of events or objects or characters, whether directly perceived or represented, is discrepant relative to a schema. Expectation plays an important role, by making schemata available which are then checked against the perceptions. Narratives and the sequential aspects of texts often depend on expectation to play this role in enabling schematic discrepancy.